Not long ago, after giving a talk about the growing number of women who are breadwinners in their marriages, I was approached by an audience member who identified herself as a lawyer. She said that she was definitely seeing this trend in her practice ”” nearly 40% of working wives now outearn their husbands ”” and that while economic power is a good thing, overall, for women, it can have one negative outcome many don’t anticipate. Among her divorce clients, she said, more and more were women who found themselves ordered by a court to pay spousal support to ex-husbands. ”And boy,” she said, “are they pissed.”
That these women are angry is to be expected: men don’t like paying alimony either, and writing a check every month has long been, for men, one of the prime impediments to postmarital bliss. But their reaction also suggests that women, while eager to benefit from progress and expanded opportunities, are not so willing to accept the more painful consequences of our success. What’s sauce for the gander is, alas, sauce for the goose. It may or may not make it easier on these check-writing ex-wives to know that they are part of a larger movement: the degendering of alimony and divorce, which is a natural outgrowth of the degendering of roles in marriage.